This invention relates to software production systems and more particularly to such systems where certain portions of the software need to be generated several times.
A software system consists of several components, or modules, each performing a specific task. These components usually implement one or more functions, and/or are responsible for a certain structured piece of information that must be maintained, updated and retrieved in order for the software system, as a whole, to perform its overall task.
There are two categories of modules in a software system: (1) action modules that perform actions needed specifically for the task the system is designed to perform and (2) support modules that perform general data manipulation operations needed to support software modules of the first category. In a typical system, the majority of modules belong to the second, or support, category.
There exists a great deal of similarity between the support modules of different software systems. For example, all operating systems must, in some manner, maintain and manipulate stacks, queues and tables of items. The required operations for the manipulation of, say, a table of items are the same regardless of the items stored in the tables. However, a single operating system may be required to handle several independent tables, each containing items of different types. Also, different operating systems may manipulate different types of items, hence, requiring different tables for those items.
With the present state of the art in software development technology, modules of a software system are developed all from scratch. This is true in spite of the fact that most of the modules have been developed many times previously for other similar software systems. The reuse of previously developed software components is not presently possible since the existing software development tools do not allow the specification and production of generic modules. As the state of the art exists today, modules can be developed only to perform specific fixed actions on specific items of fixed type structured in a fixed format. As a result, a software module that supports, for example, a table of items of one type cannot be used to support a table of items of another type. Or, as another example, a module which employs a particular search strategy to find items in a table cannot be used if a different search strategy is desirable. Thus a need exists in the art for a system which allows the automatic generation of portions of the software according to the requirements specified by the software developers.